Robert Schumann
must seem in many ways typical of the age in which he lived, combining a number of the
principal characteristics of Romanticism in his music and in his life. Born in Zwickau in
1810, the son of a book seller, publisher and writer, he showed an early interest in
literature and later made a name for himself as a writer and editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a journal launched in
1834. After a period at university to satisfy the ambitions of his widowed mother, but
still showing the wide interests of a dilettante, Schumann was able to turn more fully to
music under the tuition of Friedrich Wieck, a famous teacher, whose energies had been
largely directed towards the training of his beloved daughter Clara, a pianist of
prodigious early talent.

Schumann's own
ambitions as a pianist were to be frustrated by a weakness of the fingers, the result, it
is supposed, of mercury treatment for syphilis, which he perhaps had contracted from a
servant-girl in Wieck's employment. Nevertheless he wrote a great deal of music for the
piano during the 1830s, much of it in the form of shorter genre pieces, often enough with
some extra-musical, literary or autobiographical association. The end of the decade
brought a prolonged quarrel with Wieck, who did his utmost, through the courts, to prevent
his daughter from marrying Schumann, bringing in support evidence of the latter's
allegedly dissolute way of life. He might have considered, too, a certain mental
instability, perhaps in part inherited, which brought periods of intense depression.

In 1840 Schumann
and Clara married, with the permission of the court. The year brought the composition of a
large number of songs and was followed by a period during which Clara encouraged her
husband to tackle larger forms of orchestral music, while both of them had to make
adjustments in their own lives to accommodate their differing professional requirements
and the birth of children. A relatively short period in Leipzig was followed, in 1844, by
residence in Dresden, where Wagner was now installed at the Court Theatre, his conversation causing
Schumann to retire early to bed with a headache in 1850 the couple moved to Düsseldorf,
where Schumann had been appointed director of music, a position the demands of which he
was unable to meet, a fact that contributed to his suicidal depression and final
break-down in 1854, leading to his death in the asylum at Endenich two years later Schumann
completed his first symphony early in 1841 and it was performed on 31st March that year by
the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by Mendelssohn In April he set to work on an
Overture, intended as part of an orchestral suite, to which he added a Scherzo and a
Finale, to be performed in Leipzig on 6th December. The Finale
was later revised by the composer. The Overture
opens with a brief introduction, marked Andante con moto, based on a brief motif of
dramatic implication. An Allegro follows, with an initial theme that might well have
sounded familiar to Mendelssohn, although Schumann never had quite the lightness of touch
of that composer. The Scherzo and its Trio are scored more heavily than might have been
expected, the woodwind assuming some prominence in the latter section, before the
insistent rhythm of the Scherzo reasserts itself. The Trio makes a brief re-appearance
before the final bars, in which the opening rhythm is recalled. The Finale has an imposing
fugal opening, in a movement that seems to justify the composer's own reference to the
work as a symphonette. There is an imposing cheerfulness about the music and a coherence
of structure that enables it, as Schumann intended, to stand on its own, if this were to
be required.

The opera Genoveva and the incidental music for Manfred belong
to the Dresden period of Schumann's life in 1843 Friedrich Hebbel had published his
five-act blank verse tragedy Genoveva, based
on the Volksbuch von der Pfalzgräfin Genoveva
and later French and German sources. The young knight Golo is left by the crusader
Pfalzgraf Siegfried to guard his wife Genoveva. In his lord's absence Golo seeks the love
of Genoveva, who rejects him and is then imprisoned on a false charge of adultery with the
loyal knight Drago, whom he has put to death Genoveva, in prison, gives birth to
Siegfried's son, and is finally saved when the murderer, hired to kill her as she is led
into the forest at Golo's command, is himself killed by a madman, der tolle Klaus
Siegfried, returning, believes that Genoveva has been false to him and rejects her child
as anothers. Golo finally repents and has himself blinded by his companion to be
left to die in the forest where Genoveva and her child now live. The opera itself ends
happily with the reconciliation of Siegfried and Genoveva.

Schumann made a
very poor impression on Hebbel, when they met briefly at the composer's suggestion, and
was eventually left to devise his own opera libretto based on the work of Hebbel and a
play on the same subject by Ludwig Tieck, after rejecting a version prepared for him by
the poet and painter Robert Reinick, who had settled in Dresden in 1844. The opera was
first staged in Leipzig in June 1851 before a distinguished audience that included Liszt
and the violinist Joachim but its reception was lukewarm. The Overture, however has had
more success, written in the space of five days at the beginning of ApriI 1847, an
effective orchestral composition.

Immediately
after the completion of Genoveva Schumann set to work on Manfred, based on the dramatic poem by Lord Byron,
whose work Schumanns father had published in translation. A hero with whom Schumann himself might have
identified as Hebbel had identified in some measure with his villain Golo, Manfred seeks
oblivion for some mysterious crime wandering as an outcast in the Alps, attempting death
and summoning spirits to his aid, finally to deny the power of evil demons over him before
death takes him. The Byronic hero and the Caspar Friedrich landscape exercised fascination
over a number of nineteenth century composers, of whom the most distinguished was to be
Tchaikovsky. Schumann devised a libretto
based on the German translation of Manfred
by the Silesian pastor Karl von Suckow, a series of fifteen scenes, preceded by an
Overture, the last again more effective and hence more often heard than the work that it
introduces. The first complete performance of
Manfred was in Weimar in 1852 under the
direction of Liszt who included, as an intermezzo, Wagners Faust Overture, this in the absence of the composer,
who felt unable to undertake the Journey from Düsseldorf. The Overture, however had been given earlier concert
performances in Leipzig by the Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Schumann and in Weimar.

In 1844 Schumann began to consider the
possibility of setting Goethes Faust to music. Rejecting the possibility of doing justice to the work in operatic form, he
chose instead to concentrate on a series of scenes, starting with the final apotheosis,
which was eventually given a public performance in 1849, as part of the celebrations
marking the centenary of Goethe's birth. At
this period Schumann added six further scenes and finally in 1853, an Overture, written
during a period of five days in August. The whole work was first performed in Cologne
eight years later at the insistence of the baritone Julius Stockhausen.

The young writer
Richard Pohl had approached Schumann in 1850 with the proposal of an opera based on
Schillers play Die Braut von Messina.
Pohl, a philosophy student from Dresden, later provided Schumann with a libretto for his
projected oratorio Martin Luther, a work
that came to nothing. Die Braut von Messina, The Bride of Messina, inspired
only a concert overture, completed in 1851 and first performed in Düsseldorf on 13th
March that year in a programme that also included Schumanns work for chorus and
orchestra Nachtlied, a setting of a poem by
Hebbel, and the Rhenish Symphony. Schillers tragedy, an attempted recreation of
Greek drama, deals with the fatal rivalry of two brothers, sons of the ruling prince of
Messina, and their love for a girl who turns out to be their sister. The drama ends with the death of the two brothers,
one killed by the other, who then takes his own life. Schumanns sonata-form Overture is dominated by a motif representing
the curse on the family and seemed to him quite straightforward, although he found the
Düsseldorf audience unenthusiastic in its response.

The same year
1851, brought the composition of two further concert overtures, the first to Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar, and the second inspired by
Goethes epic poem Hermann und Dorothea,
its nine books each bearing the name of one of the nine Muses. Hermann, the son of a
Rhineland inn-keeper, falls in love with Dorothea, a penniless girl making her escape from
the disturbances consequent on the French Revolution. In spite of parental opposition and
misunderstandings the couple are eventually betrothed. The Oveture makes use of phrases
from the Marseillaise, in an attempt to suggest the period and events described in
Goethe's poem, and was intended, it seems to introduce a Singspiel on the subject, a
project that the composer had had long in mind. The Roman general Julius Caesar and the
drama of his assassination are less aptly evoked.

The Polish
National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Katowice (PNRSO)
The Polish Radio National Symphony
Orchestra of Katowice (PRNSO) was founded in 1945, soon after the end of the World War II,
by the eminent Polish conductor Witold Rowicki. The PRNSO replaced the Polish Radio
Symphony Orchestra which had existed from 1934 to 1939 in Warsaw, under the direction of
another outstanding artist, Grzegorz Fitelberg. In 1947 Grzegroz Fitelberg returned to
Poland and became artistic director of the PRNSO. He was followed by a series of
distinguished Polish conductors - Jan Krenz. Bohdan Wodiezko, Kazimierz Kord, Tadeusz
Strugala, Jerzy Maksymiuk, Stanislaw Wislocki and, since 1983, Antoni Wit. The orchestra
has appeared with conductors and soloists of the greatest distinction and has recorded for
Polskie Nagrania and many international record labels.

Johannes Wildner
Johannes Wildner was born in the Austrian resort of
Mürzzuschlag in 1956 and studied violin and conducting, taking his diploma at the Vienna
Musikhochschule and proceeding to a doctorate in musicology. A member of the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra, Johannes Wildner has toured widely as leader of the Vienna
Symphony Orchestra Johann Strauss Ensemble and of the Vienna Mozart Academy. As a
conductor he has directed the Orchestra Sinfonica dell'Emilia Romagna Arturo Toscanini,
the Budapest State Opera Orchestra, the Silesian Philharmonic and the Malmo Symphony
Orchestra. He conducted performances of the Vienna Volksoper in the autumn of 1989 and has
been invited to Japan, China, Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Italy.